A Theatrical Ecstasy
Such an astonishing, literal transformation on stage—Dionysian, Maenadic, Bacchic—I had never witnessed until last Saturday, when I stood stunned before the exalted actress and poet Sissy Doutsiou. She portrayed the mythical insect—naked yet seemingly armoured in metal—while peeling away, one by one, the seven veils of Isis and dancing the frenzied dance of us all: the alienated workers who can no longer endure the charade, the waiting, the begging for money, for life itself.
We commit slow, everyday suicides—not like the romantic poet Karyotakis, with a bullet to the heart—but through a drawn-out agony. For others. But above all, for ourselves.
Yes. The show is that good!
While life outside smiles and the sun still shines, even into the deepest darkness of the soul. The Midnight Sun. The hymn of the initiated in the mysteries of Love and Death. A holy dread. Rarely do I find myself sighing deeply in a theatre seat. Rarely am I truly ecstatic. Most often I just shiver when something extraordinary—something that at first appears strange but is not—touches me.
Sissy Doutsiou is a phenomenon—self-destructive and meteoric, extreme and transitional. But she strikes the limbic. I first encountered her as a poet—passionate and relentless, excessive and unpredictable. An uncompromising yet deeply erotic lioness.
And now I witnessed a luminous, winged reptile rising from the base of her spine and crowning her head with seven cobra heads—one for each chakra of the awakened, furious kundalini. She is not a woman. She is a creator. A being reinventing herself within Kafka’s symbolic, restrained work—a work far more complex than we tend to believe.
Kafka is a poet—otherwise he could never inspire such a performance through his austere language.
This production is EXCELLENT. UNSURPASSED. UNIQUE.
It should be captured on film with three cameras, scene by scene, infinitely many times—so that this magnitude, this luminous force on stage, can be preserved. It dissolves everything and purifies everything.
This performance awakens “Mercy and Fear” in anyone who believes they’ve got life figured out—anyone comfortably settled in their thoughts, deluded into thinking everything is in order and no danger looms over their head. When, in truth, both within and around them, in this liquid universe, explosions erupt and lava pours every cosmic second.
This Metamorphosis was a theatrical climax—a transformation experienced with the complicity of the audience.
If the Institute for Experimental Arts can achieve this with Kafka, what else might they do? Perhaps with the musical and dramatized poetry of Sissy Doutsiou, or of some unknown poet, novelist, dramatist—what’s his name, what’s his name? What else will they create?
All I know is this: Tasos Sagris, through this production, has rewritten The Bacchae a hundredfold in modern tongues.
Maybe it’s time for just that as a next step?
I saw Metamorphosis, and I was entranced—and I mean it. I’m not easily moved, and I don’t praise lightly. Not even beauty.
But this… this was beyond.
Excellent.
